SOURCE: "A Genre Renewed: Formal Reflections on the Fables of Jean de La Fontaine," in Papers on French Seventeenth Century Literature, Vol. X, No. 19, 1983, pp. 747-55.

In the following essay, Rubin clarifies the definition of the term 'fable" and asserts that La Fontaine employs the fable genre not in its traditional rhetorical or instructional format—not to persuade or please—but as a means to provoke thought in its readers In footnote¹, Rubin writes: "This article is a slightly revised and expanded version of a paper presented before the 17th-century French Literature Division of the Modern Language Association of America on 28 December 1982. I am indebted to the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation for supporting the research from which these observations have been extracted"

Those great out-of-order dictionaries of received ideas, the literary manuals, never fail to assert two quarter-truths in their sections on La Fontaine: first, that the...